Joe Flood: The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities

In the interview and article for the Atlantic monthly magazine, "The Fires This Time: Joe Flood on Managing New York City" Joe Flood said this: One of the big appeals of using numbers to understand complex problems is getting counterintuitive results, which by definition go against common sense. After all, why spend all the time and money on a study that will only tell you what you already suspected? And we love surprising, counterintuitive takes on the world--it's one of the reasons we like reading Freakonomics, or Malcolm Gladwell's work or Michael Lewis' Moneyball, where the numbers reveal that the chubby guy who strikes out a lot is actually incredibly valuable to a baseball team. Those are the kind of results the city hired RAND to produce, and that's what they got. According to the models, they could close busy fire companies in fire-prone areas without much impact on overall service. For the city, that meant saving money, focusing budget cuts in politically weak areas and supposedly not losing much fire protection. That was exactly what everyone wanted to hear, and they ran with it. It just happened to be wrong. It wasn't the first time it had happened and certainly wasn't the last. Think of Robert McNamara's Pentagon during Vietnam, or Wall Street computer models alchemy that turned no-money-down mortgages into AAA-rated securities. Modelers usually come from a purely scientific background, but things like finance and government services aren't sciences--there's a human element. The models will never be perfect, and people who make and use them need to take a humble approach and second guess their own work. Bill James, one of the heroes of Moneyball, once said something along the lines of, "Any new metric should tell you 80% what you already knew, and 20% what you didn't. Less than 20% and it's not very useful, more than 20% and there's probably something wrong with the numbers." That "more than 20%" part is where RAND got caught. They believed their own studies, the fire department and mayor's office believed in RAND (and in the political usefulness of RAND's findings) and no one bothered to question whether the results were too good to be true.



The Wall Street Journal: In his new book, Joe Flood writes about a New York City governed by a technocratic, data-driven mayor facing a crippling budget deficit who is forced to close firehouses. “The Fires” chronicles the deteriorating 1970s New York of Mayor John Lindsay, when an epidemic of fires destroyed huge sections of the Bronx, Lower Manhattan, Harlem and Brooklyn. Sure, vast swaths of modern-day Queens aren’t about to go up in flames — we hope — but the book underscores undeniably eerie parallels between Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s well-run city and Lindsay’s New York. Like Bloomberg, Lindsay prized the notion of applying rigorous metrics to analyze the performance of city agencies. Faith in data-driven technocratic solutions led Lindsay to embrace the RAND Corporation, a military think tank brought in to make city services more efficient. The FDNY, led by a brilliant, modernizing chief named John O’Hagan, eventually adopted RAND’s reforms and closed dozens of firehouses in some of the city’s most run-down and fire-prone neighborhoods. (RAND, for it’s part, disputes the book’s characterization of its role. “The book’s central contention that fire companies were reallocated based on race or economic conditions in the neighborhoods where changes were made is not supported by the facts,” a RAND spokesman said.)

The author also wrote "Why the Bronx burned: Blame statisticians, not arson. And New York City could be making the same mistake all over again." for the New York Post, in which he said this: It was game two of the 1977 World Series, a chilly, blustery October night in the South Bronx. The Yanks were already down 2-0 in the bottom of the first inning when ABC’s aerial camera panned a few blocks over from Yankee Stadium to give the world its first live glimpse of a real Bronx Cookout. "There it is, ladies and gentlemen," Howard Cosell intoned. "The Bronx is burning." The scene quickly became a defining image of New York in the 1970s, a fitting summation of the decade perfect in every way but one: It never happened. Cosell, tapes of the game show, never said, "The Bronx is burning." Fire fatalities in New York City doubled in the 1970s, as President Jimmy Carter, Mayor John Lindsay and Fire Chief John O'Hagan faced a disaster of the government's own making, a new book claims. "It’s a great quote, if it had been a real one," says Gordon Greisman, who co-wrote and produced ESPN’s "The Bronx is Burning" mini-series based on the Jonathan Mahler book. "But we got all of this footage from Major League Baseball, including the entire broadcast of that game, and we went through all of it and it’s not there, because God knows if it was there we would have used it."

Hip-hop, money and politics are practically inextricable from each other.

In "The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop," author Dan Charnas traces how rap grew from its obscure roots in the ghettos of 1970s New York to its culmination as the world's predominant youth pop culture and a multibillion-dollar industry. The event that epitomized just how far hip-hop had come was the headline-grabbing partnership between the rapper 50 Cent and the upstart beverage company Glaceau, the maker of Vitaminwater. It may well have been the biggest deal in hip-hop history, propelling 50 Cent's personal net worth toward a half-billion dollars. In this excerpt, Charnas outlines how it happened. By the summer of 2003, 50 Cent's debut album, "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," had sold more than 5 million copies, and he was easily on his way to becoming a multimillionaire on these sales alone. But the rapper from Queens, who was born Curtis Jackson and had begun his career on the reputation of being shot nine times (a bullet was still lodged in his tongue), wasn't content to remain a recording artist. And his young manager, Chris Lighty, himself a Bronx street kid turned businessman, was well-positioned to exploit 50's stardom by creating multiple income streams. Lighty had come out of the Def Jam fold and managed such stars as Missy Elliott and LL Cool J. With Lighty, 50 Cent created the "G-Unit" brand, including a record company, a clothing company and a sneaker deal with Reebok's RBK line. The G-Unit Clothing Company was a joint-venture deal, with hip-hop-influenced designer Marc Ecko fronting the money, handling the manufacturing and distribution, and splitting the profits fifty-fifty with 50.

Read the full Dan Charnas article out of the Washington Post, here. A Chicago Tribune blog had this to say about the author and book:

Those who lament how money has sucked the creativity out of hip-hop haven’t been paying attention, Charnas argues. He says hip-hop has always been about finding a way to get paid, an art form that was driven by economic aspiration from the get-go, and proud of it (which made it not much different from rock ‘n’ roll). Like blues before it, hip-hop was basically a form of folk music, a community talking to itself through music made with readily available instruments. In the case of hip-hop, those instruments weren’t guitars but turntables and microphones. DJs honed in on key parts of dance records – break beats – and MC’s toasted or rapped over them at parties in parks, clubs and recreation centers. Out of these celebrations in the South Bronx and other destitute areas of New York City an intricate urban culture emerged that also encompassed break-dancing and graffiti art.

Read the Chicago Tribune article, here. Charnas contributed to this list of the biggest deals in hip-hop; see the list here. NPR's All Things Considered recently aired this broadcast on the author, the book, and the topics on the whole. See also: Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why It Matters

Big Book of New York: Week 2 from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

The second edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City is newly published. Hear about some of the tidbits of city lore each week in December. This week: the encyclopedia's editor-in-chief Kenneth T. Jackson and executive editor Lisa Keller join the discussion. Event: Reading and discussion of The Encyclopedia of New York City: Second Edition with Kenneth T. Jackson at the Museum of the City of New York at 6:30. Click here for more info.

Download the podcast here. See also: The Encyclopedia of New York City, Frommer's New York City 2011 (Frommer's Complete), New York City (Brooklyn Bridge & Skyline at Night) Art Poster Print - 24x36, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City

TTBOOK: Science and the Search for Meaning: Five Questions: Does the Soul Still Matter? from PRI: To the Best of Our Knowledge Podcast

Keith Ward is a prominent theologian and philosopher at Oxford University. Michael Graziano thinks spirits and the soul can be entirely explained by new insights from brain science. Stephen Asma explains what he and his fellow philosophers make of the soul these days. Elna Baker fights to save her soul in New York City. Parker Palmer says the soul still matters in an age of science. Nancey Murphy suggests Christians would be better off without the soul. Marilynne Robinson contemplates the role of soul in the age of modern science.

Download the podcast here. You've got to listen to Elna Baker's reading. It's a little cutesy, but she, a New Yorker, a Mormon, has a way of disarming you, even the most ardent skeptic out there. Utterly charming, and fatally endearing. The walk to the subway reading is worth sitting still for to appreciate. Try not breaking a stride while listening to it on the treadmill at the gym. See also: The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance: A Memoir, The New York Regional Mormon Singels Halloween Dance - A Memoir, Don't You Marry the Mormon Boys